REVIEW: Storm Warriors, The (2009)

Making a typical Michael Bay movie look deep and meaningful by comparison is THE STORM WARRIORS, an over-stylized and over-hyped fantasy wuxia actioner with an incomprehensible, underdeveloped plot and wooden characters that amounts to 110 minutes of excessive slo-mo, tortured facial expressions, stoic posturing, mumbling about obscure fictional martial arts styles of no interest, and choppy, overlong fantasy fighting suitable for falling asleep to. Coupled with their misfired 2008 Hollywood redo of BANGKOK DANGEROUS, directing brothers Danny and Oxide Pang appear on a mission to destroy the reputation they built on the original BANGKOK DANGEROUS and horror classic THE EYE (2002). THE STORM WARRIORS has plenty of the brothers’ patented visual style but nothing else, least of all substance or entertainment value even as mindless action.

Story-wise, THE STORM WARRIORS, a sequel to THE STORM RIDERS (1998), is a complete failure on every level. The core plot, which is set in a fictional martial world created by comic book author Ma Wing-shing, is not explained in any way, is flimsily constructed and hardly justifies building a nearly two-hour movie around it which may partly explain why most of the running time is filled out by slow-motion action sequences and lots of standing around during and in between action.

In a nutshell, two super-powered Chinese dudes train to fight one super-powered Japanese dude (who is actually Chinese) and then they fight each other. That’s it. However, I’ll elaborate to put my subsequent criticism into better context.

A Japanese warlord named Lord Godless (played by Simon Yam) is threatening to conquer China with his supreme fighting skills. China’s top champions, fronted by Wind (Ekin Cheng) and Cloud (Aaron Kwok), suffer a beat down and are forced to withdraw. Recognizing that their fighting skills need some improvements before they can challenge Sparkles McGodless again, Winded and Cloudy set out on a quest to learn some new tricky tricks fast. “Everyone Knows it’s Windy” opts to tap into a super duper powerful source of fighting power at the expense of exposing himself to its evil, evil taint while “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” develops awesome sword techniques so new they don’t even have a name yet. Wow. Our rock star heroes, with perfectly flowy hair, reunite to defeat Gilbert Godless – trust me, this is not a spoiler unless you’re like three years old or have never seen an action movie before – but the Windtalker loses control of his power and turns his heinous power on Cloud Nine. The two battle it out with weepy results. The end.

There are a number of supporting characters, but they’re hardly worth mentioning because their involvement has no impact whatsoever on the main plot, nor are they of any interest. Nicholas Tse is a lieutenant or son of Godless who appears to be a growing threat but just disappears from the story without fanfare or explanation. Charlene Choi is a female warrior that hangs around for no discernible reason other than perhaps some undeveloped romantic interest in Wind. Patrick Tam, Lam Suet and others fill roles that I’ve already forgotten about.

I would be shocked to find out there even was a script drafted for this movie. If there was, it could have fit on two sides of a single page. What little dialogue there is might as well have been ad-libbed. It’s all forgettable and inconsequential.

It’s astonishing how bad the film is structured. The beginning feels like the mid-section of some drawn out wuxia TV series where we have missed all of the character development and lead-up to this big confrontation between warriors. But instead of stepping back to explain anything that’s going on or making even a mild attempt to give the viewer some reason to care about any of it, the film just carries on with what is basically an overlong finale to some story that we’re supposed to know in advance. I haven’t read the comics but I do know it has been 11 years since the first film, THE STORM RIDERS, was released. That’s enough time to justify a franchise reboot for a new generation, if not at least some explanation for what has gone on before. There is no excuse for not easing audiences into this story and its characters given the enormous waste of screen time on visual filler.

The action sequences are just as bad as everything else. The camera work and substantial digital effects are technically proficient and could have contributed to the creation of some very exciting fights. Yet without any story or character development to back up the action it all might as well be footage from a music video or TV advertisement. It’s made worse by the Pang brothers’ obsession with slow-motion and their tendency to rely on close-up, choppy editing and excessive comic book styling that’s shoved down the viewer’s throat with no restraint, finesse or apparent understanding of how to properly pace action or place it into any context. With few exceptions, actual fighting moves and techniques are not impressive at all. It’s all been seen before and performed and presented better under vastly superior conditions with far smaller budgets and cheaper special effects.

About the only part of the action I found any enjoyment in was seeing Aaron Kwok use a sword technique against Simon Yam that creates a web of razor-sharp wires. I don’t understand it, even from the perspective of an avid wuxia genre fan, but it looks interesting, actually has a small measure of isolated tension completely lacking from the rest of the movie, and I haven’t seen anything like it in film since KUNG FU HUSTLE, which is a far superior big-effects martial arts movie.

Capping off this overly dramatic and stale disaster of a movie is a bombastic score with unimpressive, generic orchestral and choral music that could have been ripped out of a B-grade sword and sandal TV movie from the U.S. And if the film itself isn’t canned enough, opening and closing credits are set to sickly sweet Cantopop, which is the Eastern equivalent of being tortured with the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cyrus.

It’s like the Pang brothers decided to take everything that makes Hong Kong action cinema great and replace it with everything that is wrong with big-budget Hollywood action movies at the moment. If I want to get pummeled by a maelstrom of empty-headed digital effects action that washes away disposable characters and plotting in a flood of excessively-stylized, slo-mo violence, I can watch 300 or THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS, two films that are far superior to THE STORM WARRIORS despite their own faults and excesses. Andrew Lau’s THE STORM RIDERS, Hong Kong’s first major digital effects movie, was also far from perfect but looks a lot better today when compared with this dismal sequel. It’s a big disappointment because China should have its own reputable comic book superhero movies and this could have been one of them had someone actually given some thought to writing a real script prior to shooting.

REVIEW: Storm Warriors, The (2009), 3.0 out of 10 based on 10 ratings

by Mark Pollard

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The Storm Warriors (2009)